the un-poem
26 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
words bubble up
jumble in my heart / stuck in my chest
dying to break the surface
come out in burbling spurts
chunks of deep dark past / pieces of new good present
anger/ love
broken / restored
stubborn/ changed
heart sick/ healed
tears that I used to cry for myself / now I cry for others
trapped / escaped and free
am I really what you say I am?
can I really do what you said I can do?
puzzle pieces
fitting together to make a picture I’ve never seen
but that You painted of my life before I was born
every single thing working together to create
this beautiful tapestry of my life
using the pain / using the hurt
letting it go
been forgiven / so I’ve forgiven
been forgiven / so I forgive
was loved first / so i love
harder /stronger /fiercer than ever before
quiet lioness
propelled into today by yesterday
waiting for tomorrow with expectancy
thankful for what was, what is and what’s to come
and I am
LOVE…
Book Worming it to the end, and over again…
12 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in books, children, God, hopes, life, love
Born and raised a book worm. Groomed early by my father who took my sister and I on wondrous treks to the local library when we were little and on Saturdays took us to our most coveted spot of all – the main Library in Center City. The building was old and had a huge marble stair case. The children’s section was tucked away in a beautiful basement nook. Much more than a nook because the space was immense and the options for reading seemed endless to me at that time. It’s weird, I can almost picture my dad, the young professional dad wearing his fro shaped low holding my sister and my hand’s. Both of us wearing long pig tailed braids, with a straight part in the middle, just the way my mom liked to do our hair. striped shirts, shorts and sneakers. Skipping along side my dad as he made up some fantastical game to play on the way to the library. He was always great at that. At taking nothing and making it something amazing and fun. A walk that could have been long and hot was one of the best things we did with him.
I didn’t know it then but my dad was planting seeds in us. Seeds of a love of reading and learning. And since then I’ve loved books always being able to escape whatever surroundings I was in to immerse myself in worlds far away and detached from my own. As a young child I devoured books easily reading probably about 150 books per year. As I got older, my trips to the library became less frequent as the books became longer that I read and held me over longer. But there have been plenty a night that I’ve stayed awake until 3 or 4am, unable to go to sleep until I finished the current amazing page turner that I had in my hands.
With motherhood came change, diapers and potty training and work and school was so hard for me to juggle the necessary requirements to my life that reading became a luxury I could no longer afford. My time being too precious and reserved for so many others. But that was then and now today, we’re past the pampers, past the potty training and none of my children are actively trying to pry electrical outlet coverings to stick little pudgy fingers into. They just don’t. So time has come again.
And with that time has come books! But the books that I read now are different. No longer seeking to escape from reality, but choosing to embrace reality. I have this amazing love and passion for God who has healed me from so much in my life. And I seek him even in books! So every year long, every day there is one book that you will find me reading — the Bible. I’ve actually never read anything like it. Every single time that I sit down to read it I find out something new about God and about myself. About how much He loves me, about the depths that He will go to, about how much He waits for us, how He longs for us! It’s life, heart and spirit changing stuff!
So as I sat thinking about how many books I read per year, I thought wow, born a book worm, I never thought I would ever find a book that I couldn’t devour in under a week or two. But I’ve found one that I can devour for the rest of my life over and over again! And what joy!
thats all for now,
I’ll be where I’m at reading to the day I die,
yours In His eternal love,
Aimee (LatinaBella)
Herencia
08 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
While your back is turned
You sit exposed drowning in thought
Sorrow over pain that was inflicted on you decades ago
Your children walk alone
And experience old hurts to You
new
fresh
On their innocent skin
Motherhood lost to indulgence in
artificial false escapes
inhaled into you lungs to appease the cries of you
Your own cries
sit Lost in the dark
drowning the cries of your children
your children wander alone searching for You
Herencia…
—————–
this is a poem I wrote one day on my blackberry while driving through the streets of North Philly… the pain of children needing their mothers who were so lost in their own isolated worlds of pain almost choked me… it was so thick. the urge to cry to shake the mothers out of their own sorrow and awaken them. Instead I wrote this poem and offered silent prayers up to Heaven…
Different, from the outside in…
05 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in life
I’ve come to realize that
God made me different
I’m not the same
not the socialite queen
not the buzzing friend machine
just me
different than the rest
on the outside and
on the in
programmed to LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
forgive quickly
and forget the hurts
you may not know me,
but I’m here to stay
gonna serve my Lord from now
until my dying day
gonna write
gonna draw
gonna paint
gonna sing
gonna dance
gonna love
Cause this is me
this is who I am
God made me different
in Him I’ll never be the same
Worship like a tree…
16 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in God
strong roots
outstretched branches
ready to receive
Withstanding sun
Torrential rain
Never changing posture
Bending towards the sun
Reaching eternally towards Heaven
Embracing seasons changes with grace
Words
16 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in change, children, God, hopes, life, love Tags: Heredity
Did you ever realize that there can be SO much in a word? I mean really a lot… Wanted to drop one here to turn over in your mouths, minds, and hearts for a minute
Heredity
There’s so much that can be passed down to us and that we can pass down to our own children. Most often people think of illness or body shapes, size, appearance when they think of heredity. But there is so much more that we can pass down to our children than has been captured by science…
- blessings
- gifts
- love
- disposition
- sense of humor
- intelligence
- traits
- curses
- bad habits
- fears
Changing my WALK…
24 Mar 2011 4 Comments
in change, life, love Tags: Depression, God, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Major depressive disorder, Suicide, World Health Organization
this isn't me jogging... but it's pretty cool anyhow
A SILENT KILLER
Depression can kill you. Seriously, it can literally kill you. Not only will you feel like death but you could potentially die. Depression at its worst can lead to suicide, which takes about 850,000 lives per year according to the World Health Organization[i]. For young people, ages 15 to 24, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death. [ii]However, outside of the most evident cause of death for depression (suicide), depression itself can also lead to other physical conditions that can cause death including cardiovascular disease among others.
I was actually surprised when watching a recent episode of Dr. G the Medical Examiner[iii], a young man was in good health and fell into a depression after his separation from his wife and child. The knowledge that he wouldn’t be in his little girl’s life spiraled him down into such a pit of despair that he rarely moved from his bed, choosing to languish instead. Eventually because of his non-movement, all of his organs began to slow down. This sluggishness caused his bowels to eventually become completely impacted. This impaction of fecal matter caused a leaking of e-coli into his blood stream, causing an infection that quickly killed him.
Yes, he died because he let himself wallow in misery a little too long and actually became full of crap?? Well, in a nut shell, yes. Hard to believe, but true.
MY WALK ALONG DEATH’S DOOR
You may not know this but I know firsthand about depression and have battled with it off and on during my life. I don’t know when it first began, but I have a self-portrait that I painted in high school and it’s me with blue skin to represent the pain that I felt inside. I think the piece was supposed to be similar to Dali’s style and I actually have a scale floating behind me and a school and a ball and chain. But somehow, I’ve always gotten the depression to subside for a bit.
It’d actually been about 4 years since my last bout of depression. But God in his sovereignty, allowed me to revisit those days ever so briefly recently. One of the things that became clear to me as Jesus pulled me out of the hole of despair, was that I had to take a look at the things that I had been doing that let me trip and fall into the hole in the first place. I had to ask myself what was going on with my body physically. What pieces/factors from that could have been contributing to the emotions that caused my tumble and then enabled me to stay down there?
And I knew the exact answer to that question. For months, I had fallen into a slump of eating poorly and basically not exercising. Those things had been pushed down so far on my priority list that they didn’t make the list at all. As a result, I’d gained close to 20 lbs. Yes, 20 pounds. And although the weight bothered me a little, I was so wrapped in other things in my life, all good things like God and my family, that it didn’t really bother me that much. The issue that really had me down was my skin. My skin was worse than it had been during my teen years. And just a step shy of all over facial breakout like the time I used a facial moisturizer that I had an allergy to and developed acne worthy of a PROACTIVE commercial.
About a year ago this time, I was very active in the gym, but I stopped that when my daughter began to give me too hard of a time when going to the gym child care center.
CHANGING MY WALK
It was a bit of a smack in the face to realize that the very same things that I had been putting in my mouth had caused my grief. And I could point the finger of blame only at myself in the mirror. I did this to myself. And I said, enough. I decided that I had to cut certain things out of my diet for a while until my skin was back on track and I lost a little weight… most dairy, sugar, carbohydrates, candy, soda, juice, and a few other things. If I had to have coffee every day, then it’s not going to be this pleasurable experience or phenomenon that I had let it become – coffee with milk, sugar and bread dragging out the cup to the last drop. No more, my body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit and deserves to be treated with that level of respect.
[i] World Health Organization statistics on depression – http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/definition/en/index.html
[ii] Suicide Awareness Voices of Education statistics – http://www.save.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&page_id=705d5df4-055b-f1ec-3f66462866fcb4e6
[iii] Dr. G the Medical Examiner - http://health.discovery.com/tv/dr-g-medical-examiner/
Related Articles
- Spotlight on Recurrent Brief Depression (brighthub.com)
Is Chivalry Dead?
17 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
in life
Yes, the feminists killed it. Then they came back and kicked in the stomach to make sure it was really dead before they walked away empowered.
Suffer not the little children…
04 Mar 2011 3 Comments
in God, love Tags: Christian, God, Gospel of Matthew, Holy Spirit, Jesus, Kingdom of Heaven, Lord
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday was Eric’s Confirmation. One of the seven sacraments that are given to Catholics during life and the final one that you receive as a child. Him receiving the sacrament was something that I was on the fence about because we’re Christians now. Not Catholics. And I want Eric to embrace that, real raw worship of God, not rituals and traditions rooted in the antiquated that make it hard to find God hidden behind them. And make God feel unobtainable, like this entity far off in the cosmos somewhere watching us on and off with feigned interest. No, that’s not what God is, He is so much larger and bigger than what I had ever imagined and so much more personal too, attached and interested in each of us genuinely. Not like an acquaintance that you meet and you small talk with, no He doesn’t want that. He wants us to talk to Him and be REAL with Him because he’s walked our walks with us. He’s counted every tear that has every fallen from our cheeks, and knows us so intimately that he knows how many hairs we have on our heads. Yes, he loves us THAT much!
So, Confirmation, the receiving of the gift of the Holy Spirit, in this reserved ceremony seemed so strange and ritualistic almost to me now. But as Eric was kind enough to point out to his brother when he told him “why are you doing that? We’re not Catholic! We’re Christians now” He simply responded “well I’m HALF-Catholic!” Okay. And in honor of the half of him that was Catholic, we acquiesed. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit after all. And if my son is going to receive a touch of God in any form, then I’m all for it. Even if that touch comes from an old religion that’s struggling to keep up with modern times and modern issues and challenges. It almost seems like a an old pressed leaf between the pages of a book that you find after years. Still clinging to life but really just stuck between two worlds – life and death.
Anyhow, it struck me while I was there, most people that were there had forgotten the old routines of when to sit, stand and kneel. The priests had to remind everyone of what was to take place next. That spoke of how often everyone who sat in the pews had been there over the past few months and years… often enough that the hands of time had worn away the traditions that were supposed to have been etched in their minds.
I was also amazed by the high level of distractability of everyone in the church. Anytime there was a noise (most often made by a child), about 10 or 20 people would turn their heads to see where the noise came from and glare at the noisy offender, annoyed that they had imposed on their silent glazed self-controlled obedience…
Now if at anytime you find yourself so distracted by little things, one would think it might be time to search your own heart. What’s going on that your giving the sound of a pew falling or little feet walking a higher place than God? Question yourself! Why are you so quick to turn and judge the child and the parents instead of judging yourself?? Now, this actually has nothing to do with my own children but a man who was seated in front of us with his small 3 year old son. With every glare, he would turn red and look at his own son with anger. And his poor little son was pretty well behaved considering the circumstances.
It amazed me though that after YEARS, the same thing is still going on. I remember every Sunday after mass when I was small getting spanked for having turned around to look at the people behind us and disrupting the mass. But the Catholic Church has never embraced any sort of children’s church, they always wanted children in service with parents, and the poor parents have to suffer through service trying to feel God’s presence and keep their children as still as if they were immobilized statues without voices, impossible for children.
Now let’s think for a moment, if the adults that kept turning to pay attention to noises were a child in the present day classrooms and displayed that same high level of distractability… what would that lead to?? They could very well be labeled ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and be drugged to become focused. So my question is… does the problem lie with the child who’s behaving normally or the adult who’s behaving distractedly?? How much of the expectations that we are placing on children today are valid?? And how much of those same expectations that you uphold for others children were YOU able to uphold as a child OR did you have your own children uphold??
Now let’s stop for a moment to look at what the Great Teacher, Jesus, had to say about children…
Then the little children were brought to Jesus for Him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there. -Matthew 19:13-14
Yes, Jesus stopped and prayed for EACH and EVERY child before he moved forward. Little children are THAT important to him. Praise God! So all of you who are seeking the Kingdom of God, for eternal savation, who basically don’t want to go to Hell until the end of time, you must first make yourself like a child to gain that entry. So don’t think yourself better than the child or the parent who’s there seeking the same thing you are but sit and marvel at them! Be in awe of their honest sweet innocence. LEARN from them! Pray to God to give you what they have – a childlike heart in love, a childlike heart in faith, a childlike heart in forgiveness. What is different about how a child loves in comparison to how an adult loves? What’s different about how a child forgives to how an adult forgives? And what’s different about how a child has faith, how they BELIEVE versus how an adult believes??
Do you get it now? Yes, you too, have a few good things that you stand to gain by observing and learning from a child. And above all else, keep your eyes on God, during service, when praying and even in life in general. Don’t let little distractions pull you away from YOUR portion. What is God trying to give and bless you with right now that you are too distracted to notice??
Father God, I just pray right now for us to keep our eyes on you in all things Lord. And when distractions are wonderful blessings from Heaven, instead of judging, let us be soft hearted Lord! Remove the callouses that the world has placed on our hearts and give us YOUR heart! YOUR eyes to see. We love you Lord. Help us to seek you every day. Increase us Lord. Increase our hearts to love without conditions like children. Increase our faith to believe like children without science, facts and proof. Increase our capacity to forgive our hurts Lord without making others jump through hoops and over mountains and hills to EARN forgiveness. Let us forgive even when its not warranted or deserved to be closer to YOU Lord. All this I pray and more in JESUS NAME. Amen.
Thanksgiving lessons from my 6 year old
23 Nov 2010 1 Comment
in children, fear, God, life, love Tags: Cooking, CranberrySauce, food, God, Holidays, Recipe, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving dinner
Cranberry sauce from a can, sliced.
Today is the last day of the Thanksgiving can drive he said
His eyes stared up at mine questioning and hopeful, expecting
I had 6 cans of the stuff we never eat ready to go.
Cranberry sauce, gelatinous glop, I had never liked the stuff and I never serve it. But somehow about 6 cans of it had made its way into my cabinets.
But Cranberry sauce wasn’t enough he said. He didn’t want to take the same thing. He wanted some different stuff, some good stuff.
He opened the cabinet and pulled out green beans, corn and raviolis. And inside I panicked. But that’s our food. That’s for us.
Times have been really tight and with 3 kids I don’t want to give away cans of food we can eat to anonymous families. We can use that food. We can eat that stuff.
But he’s only 6, so he doesn’t understand the food math that Mami is quickly calculating in her brain. And he drops them into his bag.
I swallowed my fear and let it go.
It’s thanksgiving after all. Isn’t that what it’s all about, giving? And being thankful that you have been blessed to receive and to give?
We walked to the bus stop this morning, me carrying hot cocoa in one hand for my darling and his bag of 6 cans in my other hand.
Dark night about to be broken by day filled the sky.
Soft mist swirled about the grass on the park.
Chris looked at the sky and pointed at something he saw “what’s that white light Mami?”
“It’s a star honey.” The only star that you could see through the smog of the city. Cause there really aren’t stars in the night sky in Philly anymore.
Star light star bright
First star I see tonight
I wish I may I wish I might…
There’s not much wishing on stars in Philly anymore. Not much at all.
But this morning, we saw the one and only, the star of hope. And I just felt blessed.
And suddenly the anonymous family became a real family in my mind. A single mother that had less food in her cabinets then me. And would be so happy for the cans of real food that Chris gave with such an open heart. I could picture the mother feeling peace come into her heart as she knew her babies wouldn’t go hungry that day.
The bus came and picked up my little bundle of love. And I walked home with prayers of thanks on my lips, that I would never want to keep my pantry overfilled at the expense of someone else.
Give us today our daily bread.
And let me not try to store food like a squirrel, but give openly and in my giving have faith that I will receive, that God will provide, just as He provided what was on my shelves to begin with.
Related Articles
- Get Crazy with Cranberries (wholefoodsmarket.com)
- Count-Down to Thanksgiving Cranberry-Ginger Relish (pbenjay.wordpress.com)
Recent Comments